Source | A little finance
Author | Mu Bai
Edit | Liu Yu
A few years later, looking back at the new crown epidemic in early 2020, it will also be a watershed for the medical and beauty industry to enter the new market pattern.
It has to be said that the strict control of the new national epidemic situation in China has caused the suspension button in many industries, and the medical and beauty industry institutions have also fallen into a comprehensive shutdown. So far, the industry resumption rate is at an extremely low state, and the impact and impact are obvious.
A few days ago, the new oxygen technology (hereinafter referred to as "new oxygen") of the "Internet medical beauty first stock" that just released the 2019 financial report also announced that its total revenue in Q1 in 2020 will be 20 million yuan lower than that in 2018 Q1. 20 %about.
The 300 billion medical and aesthetic market is staged with new dragons and tigers.
In fact, after 2018, as Internet giants such as Ali, Meituan, JD.com, and Baidu have clearly decided to take a slice in the medical and beauty industry, the market has entered the stage of confrontation between the two major camps of the integrated platform and the vertical platform.
Vertical platforms such as New Oxygen, Meimei, Yuemei, Meibei have grown through the explosive growth of the medical and beauty industry in the past five or six years. Especially, the landing of New Oxygen in the US stock market has greatly boosted the development momentum of vertical platforms.
However, after two or three years of sinking and penetration, Ali and Meituan and other integrated e-commerce platforms have gradually shown their strength and ambitions in the field of medical beauty, and they have not brought about the development of vertical platforms. Little competitive pressure.
Under the siege of the giants, can the new oxygens be safe in the medical beauty market to "reign"? Perhaps this new crown epidemic will become an important variable factor in the changing pattern of the entire medical and aesthetic industry.
01 300 billion market capital bureau
In 2020, the market scale of China's medical and aesthetic industry will exceed 300 billion yuan, reaching 315 billion yuan; in 2018, this figure was 224.5 billion yuan, just over 200 billion yuan; in 2019, it will be 256 billion yuan.
An industry research report from AiMedia Data Center shows that since 2015, the growth rate of the domestic medical and beauty industry has been increasing year by year. Although it is greatly affected by the new crown epidemic in 2020, considering the penetration rate of the medical and beauty market and the huge population base And consumption momentum, the future market potential is still huge.
The market growth rate is fast enough, and the market size is large enough. This is the biggest motivation that attracts the comprehensive service platforms such as Ali, Jingdong, and Meituan to covet the medical and beauty market.
Before analyzing the new market pattern, it is necessary to briefly outline several historical development stages of the Chinese medical and aesthetic industry:
In the 1980s, marked by the birth of the Beijing Huangsi Surgery and Plastic Surgery Hospital, the emergence of public plastic surgery hospitals in the Ninth Hospital of Shanghai and the Eighth Congress of Beijing.
From the 1990s to the first 10 years of the new millennium, the "Putian system" known today has penetrated into the entire Chinese medical service system, and has also spawned the marketization trend of the plastic surgery industry. This stage can be regarded as the "barbarous era" of the medical beauty market;
With the systematic reform of China's medical industry and the government's strategic development of the medical and health industry, private medical care in the real sense around 2012 "entered the market" under the support of social capital, and the controversial practice of plastic surgery has gradually Recognized by the public, forming a popular medical beauty market.
After entering the "market cognition" stage, the medical and beauty industry began to change from the barbaric growth of the "black box market" to the "sunshine market" norms and standards, focusing on the development of the brand.
It is also in this process that Internet medical care has started to emerge, and Internet service platforms that are perpendicular to the field of medical aesthetics have naturally become the target of most attention for capital catchers. Vertical platforms such as New Oxygen, Meimei, Meibai, etc. gradually emerged in the subdivision track.
The emergence of vertical platforms has indeed solved the problem of information asymmetry at both ends of the medical and aesthetic market to a large extent, and gradually eliminated consumers' cognitive deviations in medical and aesthetic plastic surgery, which has also gained market recognition and confirmed its business model. rationality.
In the past five or six years, the scale of the Chinese medical beauty market has been astoundingly expanding. The rapid increase in public consumption demand is accompanied by a geometric growth in the number of medical beauty services.
The medical and beauty industry has also entered the initial stage of market competition. The battle between the vertical platforms in the medical beauty field is the most typical symbol of this stage, we may be called the medical beauty 1.0 generation;
Let's take a look at the time when the Internet giants such as Ali and Meituan clearly "entered" the medical and aesthetic industry around 2018. In this year, the scale of China's medical and aesthetic industry exceeded 200 billion yuan, and the growth trend is clear.
More importantly, in the current medical and beauty market, under the environment of increasingly strict regulations, "good coins" increase, and "bad coins" gradually withdraw, showing a market outlook with competitive value. The obstacles for giants of integrated platforms to enter the "enclosure" are basically cleared.
This new competitive landscape, we define the medical beauty 2.0 generation.
There is no doubt that today's 300 billion yuan medical beauty market has entered a mature period of consumption, and the brutal growth of various institutions and platforms is coming to an end. The next market competitors need a "hard power" to get the bottom. A platform with sufficient capital strength and market resource control is likely to become the winner of the market.
Some data may provide clues.
According to the data disclosed by Meituan Dianping (3690.HK), during the 618 promotion and the Double 11 promotion in 2019, the online transaction volume (GTV) of Meituan medical and beauty reached 670 million yuan and 1.53 billion yuan, respectively.
As the largest increment of Ali Health's O2O business, Yimei also recorded nearly 6-fold and 2-fold increase in transaction volume during the two major promotion periods in 2019 (specific details are not disclosed). This year's medical beauty business GMV target is expected to triple.
In contrast, New Oxygen, which claims to have the largest market share in the medical and aesthetic industry, has contributed to the total value of medical and aesthetic services transactions (GMV) just exceeded 3.6 billion yuan in 2019, an increase of 72.6% year-on-year.
From this data dimension, it is only in 2018 that the US team officially announced that it will cut into the medical beauty circuit. I am afraid that it has now exceeded the new oxygen. And increasing investment in the medical and beauty sector is bound to be one of the next steps of integrated platforms such as Meituan and Ali.
According to industry sources, in fact, in 2019Q4, Meituan Yimei has fully surpassed the new oxygen in key operational indicators and financial indicators, including MAU, number of paying institutions, number of paying users, transaction volume, financial income, and profit, and forecast In this year, Q1 Medical Aesthetics will become one of the fastest recovering businesses of Meituan. In 2020, it may increase investment and efforts in this business.
In 2019, New Oxygen, as the first company listed on the medical and aesthetic vertical platform, currently has a market value of around 1 billion US dollars. The market value of Meituan Dianping and Ali Health, which are listed on the Hong Kong stock market, reached US $ 70 billion and US $ 22 billion, respectively.
As of December 31, 2019, Meituan Dianping's book cash asset balance reached RMB 17 billion. The strong capital strength and resource control of Meituan is clearly an unmatched advantage of the new oxygen and vertical platforms such as Meimei and Meibai.
Next, if Meituan, Alibaba Health or JD.com are going to launch platform acquisitions and mergers in the medical beauty field, it is obviously something that can be expected.
02 The supply side resource dispute
The Chinese medical beauty market is large enough, but also complex enough.
Whether it is from the market structure and special attributes of the medical and beauty industry, or from the analysis of their respective strategic logic and business models, the integrated platform and vertical platform have not yet reached the hard-to-face stage.
The market is still in the stage of scale growth. While pushing up the user base and the number of active users, while expanding offline medical and aesthetic services and service chains, "horse racing" should be the primary task of all platform institutions.
Countries with relatively mature medical beauty markets, such as the United States, South Korea, and Brazil, have more than 10% penetration of the medical beauty market, while the current penetration rate of the Chinese medical beauty market is only 2%; -The age group of 45 years old, and consumers under 30 years old (post-90s) in China are the main consumers, accounting for more than 80%.
According to the 2019 survey data: 20-25 years old is the main consumer in the medical and beauty industry, accounting for 40.41%; followed by 26-30 years old, accounting for about 23.25%; the main medical consumer under 19 years old after 00 The proportion has reached 18.81%.
The low penetration rate and the main consumer group in the growth stage make the growth of the "demand side" of the Chinese medical and beauty market full of imagination. Compared to the demand side, the supply side is much more complicated.
Although there are data showing that there are currently more than 12,000 compliant medical and aesthetic institutions (hospitals, clinics, clinics, etc.) in China, this is only part of the market. Some market participants believe that there may be 50,000 "medical and aesthetic institutions" in the entire market.
Some research reports show that the number of "black clinics" in the domestic market is even 5-6 times that of compliance institutions, and these concealed and highly mobile, difficult-to-supervise "black clinics" have surprisingly reached the level of compliance 2.5 times as many institutions.
The dark side of the medical beauty market has a great impact on the survival of compliance agencies. Although the annual growth rate of medical and aesthetic institutions has remained above 20% in recent years, the overall operating conditions have been bleak, with large losses and exit from the market coexisting.
However, the tightening of the medical and beauty market supervision, the increasing market voice of the Sunshine Agency, and the increase in consumer awareness, "black clinics" are also constantly overflowing the market. The limited population movement brought about by the current epidemic has accelerated the reshuffle of underground institutions.
Whether it is a vertical platform or an integrated platform, the development of this part of the market space will accelerate. But another problem is that because the number of medical doctors in China is far less than that in mature markets, the training period for medical doctors is very long, which greatly restricts the growth of medical institutions.
Data show that in 2018, there were about 7,419 doctors in plastic surgery and beauty hospitals in China, including some doctors in plastic surgery, dermatology, traditional Chinese medicine, and stomatology. (Data source: "2019-2025 Chinese medical and aesthetic industry market operation situation and future forecast "Report"), the number of medical and aesthetic institutions reached 1,1973 in the same year.
Therefore, the supply-side high-quality resources are one of the key factors in the competition between the integrated platforms such as Meituan Aesthetics and Alibaba Health and vertical platforms such as Neooxic and Meimei.
As of the end of 2019, Meituan's medical and beauty business has covered nearly 400 cities, and the number of paid medical and medical institutions has reached 11,000. These institutions are all formal institutions with corresponding qualifications, which are publicized on the Meituan APP page. It can be said that the Internet and digitalization have promoted such "sunshine".
According to the 2019 annual report released by New Oxygen, there are currently about 3,500 cooperative institutions of New Oxygen. Since Xinxi's profit model is based on the bid ranking of advertising traffic, it tends to aggregate "reshaping" the head institution of the long-tail market.
However, due to the localization of medical services and the non-standard characteristics of service products, medical and aesthetic institutions are difficult to replicate on a large scale, so the concentration of the entire industry is very low. Institutions with a revenue of 100 million yuan account for the vast majority of the market.
According to estimates, the market share of the industry's leading institutions is only about 5%. This is very embarrassing for vertical platforms such as New Oxygen, which follow the advertising traffic model.
To attract more medical and aesthetic institutions to pay for advertising, they have to invest more marketing costs to obtain external traffic. The financial report shows that in 2018, the marketing costs of New Oxygen Technology accounted for 64%. Although it has declined in 2019, it is still at a high level of 58%.
There have been some new changes in the field of medical aesthetics in the past two years. For example, the number of non-surgical projects such as botulinum toxin, hyaluronic acid injection, and laser radio frequency account for more than 70%, and the market for "light medical beauty" services that can be easily standardized is rapidly heating up.
Although injection projects need to be completed by qualified medical personnel in a place with medical qualifications and medical standards, due to the difficulty of operating requirements and standardization of services is much lower than that of surgical plastic surgery, industry analysis generally believes that with the admission policy Opening up will greatly increase the number of light medicine and beauty institutions.
In particular, community-based and boutique small and light medical and aesthetic institutions have been favored by the capital in the past two years, and some analysts believe that such light medical and aesthetic institutions will show explosive growth in the future and gradually become the mainstream institution in the market.
The standardization of service products and commodities in light medical and beauty institutions means that there is less room for price changes and the profit level is relatively limited. The way of advertising traffic is always only able to increase the revenue scale of the relatively head companies, but it cannot allow more organizations to increase the profit level.
Once the flow growth of vertical platforms such as Xinxi, Meimei and Yuemei stagnate, it is only a matter of time before "institutional flight".
03 Traffic empowerment reshapes cost structure
A misunderstanding has a long history: medical beauty is a profiteering industry.
However, the reality is that the compliant medical and aesthetic institutions have far lower gross profit and net profit margins than outsiders imagine. Taking the data of Langzi shares of listed companies as an example, the gross profit margin of its medical and beauty business, which accounts for nearly 20% of its main revenue, is 58%, second to 59% of the main business of women's clothing, and higher than 53% of children and infants.
You should know that Langzi's medical beauty business has formed a brand chain operation in the southwest market. It is an institution with comprehensive strength and strong operating capacity in the entire medical beauty industry. However, its net profit margin for medical beauty business is less than 6%, or even Lower than many traditional manufacturing companies.
Except for individual flagship store-level institutions that can achieve a net profit level of more than 15%, most of their brand chain institutions are in a state of meager profit or loss. This is actually a microcosm of the overall state of the medical and aesthetic industry.
Between the higher gross profit margin level and the lower net profit margin, there is a huge “cost of acquiring customers” pressure. In the cost and expense column of financial statements of medical and aesthetic institutions, marketing expenses account for an absolute proportion of 60-70%.
In a first-tier city market like Beijing, some medical and aesthetic institutions can only acquire customers at a cost of more than 5,000 yuan per person when they arrive at the store. And among the customer unit prices consumed by customers, 50 to 70% are the "commission" returned to the channel or the amortized cost of advertising traffic.
That is to say, the cost for medical and beauty institutions to obtain customers is twice or more than the cost of serving customers, so it is not surprising that the marketing chaos in the medical and beauty industry is illegal.
For vertical platforms such as New Oxygen, its own external flow acquisition costs are also increasing year by year, and this pressure has to be passed on to cooperative institutions. Even in July 2019, it was reported that in order to expand revenue, New Oxygen "advertisement fees rose four times a month, and forcibly issued exclusive policies to cooperative institutions."
To reduce the rising cost of acquiring customers, the core lies in whether the platform's own traffic cost can be reduced and the value can be increased.
This problem is not difficult to solve for integrated service platforms such as Meituan and Ali Health. Meituan Dianping has an overwhelming advantage in the comprehensive life service centered on eating. Its latest financial report shows that the number of transactions in 2019 reached 450 million, and C-end user traffic is the most important disk indicator for Meituan and Ali.
As for the medical beauty business, according to the data previously disclosed by Meituan, the monthly active users (MAU) of Meituan Medical in 2019 exceeded 24 million.
In contrast, the new oxygen annual report shows that since the listing, the number of monthly active users has steadily increased. The average MAU for Q4 in 2019 was 3.67 million, compared with 1.92 million, 2.47 million and 3.42 million in the first three quarters.
Obviously, an integrated service platform with tens of millions of user traffic is undoubtedly more competitive. Through the services of the multilateral market, Meituan and Alibaba Health can continuously convert and divert other users into medical and aesthetic consumption scenarios, and the life cycle value of individual users of the institution is also higher.
At the same time, platforms such as Alibaba and Meituan that have super-traffic on the consumer side are still using digital marketing and other means to help institutional clients obtain and operate customers at a lower cost and with higher efficiency. This is also an obvious trend.
In September last year, Alibaba Health released the "Renewal Plan" of Tmall's medical beauty, which is designed to help medical and beauty institutions through digital operations to better establish links with consumers.
Medical beauty is a business segment of Meituan that is relatively less affected by the epidemic and recovers faster. From the “needs” of “eating” to the “needs” of “beauty”, the big data on consumption recovery released by Meituan recently showed that orders for skin management items such as small bubbles, picosecond lasers and photorejuvenation increased by 391%, and orders of hyaluronic acid increased by 322 %, Although it is impossible to talk about "revenge consumption", the recovery after the epidemic is just around the corner. In addition, Meituan is also actively promoting digital operations to help cooperative institutions in the medical and aesthetic industry to actively resume work and resume production, and to help medical and aesthetic institutions to promote cost structure changes.
04 Conclusion
Whether it is the new oxygen of the vertical platform, more beautiful, or the integrated platform of Meituan and Ali Health, these important components of the medical beauty market have very profound implications for the overall growth and growth of the market and the industry's norms and self-discipline. significance. I believe that entering the 2.0 generation of China's medical beauty industry will surely achieve the world's largest medical beauty market.
Under this, we talk about the competitive landscape of these two types of platforms, and it does not emphasize the pros and cons of business models or the success or failure of enterprise development. In fact, these excellent platforms that are getting better and better will continue to follow the trend and adjust strategies according to market changes and their own capabilities. The rest is left to time and market to verify.
